On permanents of Sylvester Hadamard matrices

Abstract

It is well-known that the evaluation of the permanent of an arbitrary $(-1,1)$-matrix is a formidable problem. Ryser's formula is one of the fastest known general algorithms for computing permanents. In this paper, Ryser's formula has been rewritten for the special case of Sylvester Hadamard matrices by using their cocyclic construction. The rewritten formula presents an important reduction in the number of sets of $r$ distinct rows of the matrix to be considered. However, the algorithm needs a preprocessing part which remains time-consuming in general.